William Scott, R.A. 1913-1989

Painted in 1946, Cyclamen was executed the year after the end of the Second World War when Scott had returned to his life at Hallatrow and to teaching at The Bath Academy of Art. Inspired by what he had seen at the Picasso and Matisse exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London over the Christmas/New Year season, 1945 – 46, Scott returned to Paris that summer of 1946, and visited an exhibition entitled A Thousand Years of Still Life Painting which left him ‘really overwhelmed by the fact that the subject had hardly changed for 1000 years, and yet each generation in turn expressed its own period and feelings and time within this terribly limited narrow range of the still life’ (Scott as quoted by Norbert Lynton, William Scott, London 2004, p.61). Despite the seemingly ‘limited’ subject matter, the exhibition clearly let him in no doubt as to the power of the genre and its capacity for artistic creativity.

On return from France, Scott began a fresh series of still lifes focusing primarily on ordinary everyday objects, ‘a frying pan, a few eggs, a toasting fork, objects without much glamour’.  In contrast to the still lifes painted during this period such as The Frying Pan (1946, Coll. Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, London) with all the classic objects that became Scott's trademark, Cyclamen strikes a more unusual and intimate note.  The soft and delicate texture of the petals and leaves are transformed by his painterly brushstrokes, loaded with impasto into an undulating and fluid pattern of interlocking forms. They stand in contrast to the sharp edges of the table top and the geometric planes of colour in the background that verge on abstraction. The juxtaposition of foreground and background elements combine to create a subtle dynamism and offers an insight into the developments of the next decade that Scott was already contemplating (see for example Abstract, 1952, Private Collection).